Team Free Will and Comic Con
by Drowning in the Flames
Summary: Sam, Dean, and Cas head to Comic Con in search of a way to defeat a demon. They run into a friend there who wants to help.
1. Chapter 1

Dean, Sam, and Cas were sitting in a motel room, all gathered around Sam's laptop. They were staring at the screen and wrinkling their foreheads almost in unison. Cas tilted his head to the side.

"I understand this language to be Enochian, but the words don't make sense." He said, sounding puzzled.

"Well what does it say?" Asked Dean, pouring himself another glass of scotch, which Sam promptly took away from him and poured into the nearest potted plant. Dean gave him an annoyed look.

"It says, 'the answer lies with the… con' if I'm reading it correctly." Answered Cas, squinting at the screen and tilting his head further to the side. He was reading a message that had been written on the wall of a cave in San Francisco, and it was addressed to whomever wished to bring down a particularly nasty demon named Variant. Cas found it and naturally called up the Winchester boys. "I don't understand this meaning. Does it mean that we need to consult a con man?" Sam turned the screen so he could see it better, even though he didn't speak Enochian, he still wanted to feel like he could get something out of it.

"I'm not sure, a con man isn't very specific. I could name about 30 con men in the tri-state area right now, and none of them know about anything to do with the paranormal as far as I can tell." Dean and Cas just stared at him. "What? I read the papers." Dean went to the freezer and pulled out a beer.

"Whatever it means, I say we take a little siesta and reconvene in an hour or two." He brought the bottle to his lips to take a drink, only to come up empty-handed. "Oh, come on Cas, really?"

"Dean, when I raised you up from perdition 3 years ago, I formed a connection with your mind, and I find your dependency on alcohol a bit disturbing. You agreed, three days without a drop of alcohol and we would be alright."

"And how long has it been?" Cas looked at the clock on the wall, even though he didn't need to.

"40 minutes… now 41." Dean rolled his eyes and sat back down at the table.

"Great. Thanks, Cas."

"You're welcome."

"You know I was being sarcastic, right?" Cas paused, not making eye contact.

"Um, yes, of course. I am adapting to your language and your dialect, and I find that sarcasm makes up approximately 35.3% of your daily speech pattern, so naturally I have been picking up on it—"

"Oh shut up Cas." Cas did shut up, and promptly disappeared from the room. Sam stood up, heading for the door.

"Where are you going?" asked Dean.

"Out. I need a beer, and Cas took the last one from you. No, you can't come along." He left. Dean rolled his eyes and took the laptop over to the couch and turned on the TV. It just so happened that Star Trek: The Next Generation was on, and Dean smiled slightly. It had been awhile since he had watched some good TNG. He brought up the image on the computer again, alternating between staring at the foreign writing blankly and looking back up at the TV. Finally, he noticed something in the corner of the image on the computer screen. He peered closer at it, and zoomed in on it. It looked like a weird sort of symbol, but oddly familiar. He stared at it, then looked up at the television. Spock was just saying goodbye to a friend of some sort, and he held up his hand, with his middle and index fingers together, and his ring finger and pinky finger together.

"Live long and Prosper," said the character on the screen. Dean made the hand gesture himself, then peered at the symbol.

"Oh no," he mumbled, zooming in all the way on the symbol, then putting his hand over it. "Oh crap."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Sam came back to the motel room about an hour later to see Dean staring at the computer screen, eyes wide and mouth slightly agape.

"Dean, please tell me you aren't going to any websites that are gonna give my computer a virus and freeze it… again." Dean looked up at him and turned the screen to face him. "Okay, good. But you know you can't read Enochian, right?" Dean nodded, but then zoomed in to a symbol in the bottom right-hand corner. "Huh. Cas must've missed it. What is it?" Dean put his hand on top of it in the proper formation and gestured to the TV. Sam straightened up. "Oh no."

"Oh yes," said Dean, smirking now, "pack your bags, Sammy, we've got places to be. Hey Cas, we figured it out, you wanna drop by and try to help out for once?" Dean didn't see anything until a moment later when he heard a voice right behind his head and he jumped up off the couch. "Cas you jerk, you scared the crap out of me."

"Did you figure out what the meaning of the sentence is?"

"Yeah, where were you?"

"I was investigating all the con men in the tri-state area. You were wrong, Sam, there aren't 30, there are 51. And they all check out, none of them know anything about Variant. What do you have?"

"Cas, you were gone for an hour, how did you…? Never mind. Anyway, see this symbol? It's a hand forming the 'Live Long and Prosper' symbol. Between that, the location of the symbol, and the con... Guys, we're going to Comic Con."

"Dean, are you sure about this? I don't feel like we're going to blend in very well in these disguises, aren't disguises meant to make you more conformed?"

"It's not a disguise, Cas, it's a costume. And trust me, you'll blend in just fine, there's nothing more common at a convention like this than a crappy Spiderman costume." Cas pulled at the side of his red unitard.

"It's making my skin uncomfortable."

"It's called being itchy, Cas. That unitard costume is made out of the cheapest polyblend you can get, and you're gonna feel like you've been bitten by a million mosquitoes by the end of the day."

"And you say people do this for fun?" asked Cas incredulously.

"Totally. How you doing there, Sammy?" Sam touched his hair uneasily.

"Fine, I guess. But this curl is getting annoying, it's getting in my eyes. And my hair feels like a solid rock. How much hairspray did you use on me again?"

"All of it, Sam. I used all the hairspray that was in the bottle. Maybe that's the hint that it's time for a haircut. But you make a very pretty Superman." Sam rolled his eyes, touching his hair again. Dean, of course, was in a Batman costume, as comfortable as he could be. To be honest, he was enjoying himself. There were booths all around with various tv show actors and comic book characters to take pictures with, and cosplayers in every direction. Cas tapped Dean's shoulder as he was staring at an anime poster.

"Um, Dean? Who are we looking for, exactly?"

"I don't know, Cas, can't you smell out the demon or something? I got us this far."

"Dean, everyone's in masks, including myself. I'm afraid I won't be of much help right now."

"Great. So we're gonna have to do this the old-fashioned way." He walked up and stood right behind a group of people waiting for an autograph with Deadpool. He started coughing, and muttered, 'Christo' amidst the coughing several times. No one even flinched. Sam finally tore him away and started walking away to an empty corner.

"That's not gonna work, Dean, the convention ends tomorrow evening. You won't get through half the people doing that by then. We need a plan B."

"Boys?" asked a voice from behind them. They turned around to see a figure dressed as Wonder Woman walking toward them. Her costume was clearly very expensive, nothing like the cheap rags they had rushed to buy on the clearance rack of a costume store. She had on a black wig and was holding a rope, and for a moment, Dean didn't recognize her.

"Charlie?" He asked her, pulling off his Batman mask and squinting at her. "What are you doing here?"

"Um, it's Comic Con, where else would I be? The real question is, what are you doing here? You're not here to appreciate the Ork display or the Green Lantern exhibition, so why are you here dressed in embarrassingly cheap costumes? Like, seriously, where on earth did you get that crap?" Dean shifted uncomfortable. He just wanted to be Batman for a day, was that too much to ask?

"Um, actually Charlie, we're here to find someone."

"Please tell me this someone is human and just here to enjoy the festivities like everyone else and not some evil creature that wants to eat all our faces." Dean shook his head, and she sighed exasperatedly. "Great, just great, I didn't mind you taking over my life and forcing me to run away and change my identity, I didn't mind getting my arm broken for your little SucroCorp invasion, and I didn't mind almost getting my head bitten off by Leviathans, but this is my happy place! This is the biggest event of the year, and I plan out everything else in my life around this! No, there is no supernatural mumbo-jumbo stuff happening here, I won't let it! And I certainly won't help you out with finding this person, no freaking way." Dean just stared at her, and she looked away from him to Sam and Cas, who were simply staring at her, waiting for her to continue. "Fine! I'll help. But you guys owe me big time. And who are you?" Cas took off his Spiderman mask and rubbed his jaw.

"My name is Castiel. I'm an angel of the Lord. And right now my entire face has gone numb from wearing this mask for 20 minutes. Here, Dean." He handed it to Dean, who sighed and rolled it up and put it in his pocket. Charlie smiled and giggled a little at seeing this handsome angel's attractive vessel.

"Nice to meet you. I'm Charlie." She pulled herself together and clicked her heels together. "Now, shall we get to work?"


End file.
